Thursday, November 3, 2016

Healing is ultimately a quality of the heart - Quotes from - "Healing into Life and Death" by Stephen Levine

p.48
“the path of healing is a process of opening our heart to the holdings of the past while maintaining a keen awarenss of the present. It is acoming home, a return to the living moment. But becayse there is so much more to us than just bid/body, because our original nature is without boundary, its edgelessness cannot be describnved. It can only be participiated in.”

p. 28
“We saw so many bodies reestablished a certain degree of wellness. We saw so many as they cleared their heart and resolved loose ends, discover a feeling of being “more alive than ever” sometimes with a considerable diminshment of pain and symptoms. Though their body did not reflect this extra wellness something had healed so deeply into life that death was no longer a problem.”

p.33
There is the story of the chiropractor who goes to the spiritual teacher and asks how to rid his body of cancer and the teacher says “Just love yourself.”

Tomas Merton “True love and prayer are learned in the moment when prayer has become impossivle and the heart has turned to stone.”

p.71

“In taking the path of healing that leads to the heart, previous conflicts are seen as rich and fertile ground for insight into that which causes suffering and that which allows us to go beyond siffering. Our investigation of the mind, of those qualities that block the heart, become a deeper deconditioning of old holding, a demagnetizing of our incessant and mechanical identification with all that passes through the mind/body In watching the mind we see who we aren’t and enter the new territory of the heart. For it is in the heart that, with a deep sign, conflict comes to peace and the illnesses and pains of a lifetime may be dispersed in the soft receptiveness of unlimited being.”

“Crossing the bridges, having gone beyond the blockages and armoring, the self-hatred and judgement whch have for so long delayed our final healing, we sink into the heart, and the question of “Life or death?” disappears . All is experienced as life, including death. All dualities are seen as just, overdefinied points in a spiraling process."

P,77
“In ancient Chinese calligraphy, the symbol for the mind and the symbol for the heart are the same: hsin. For when the mind is clouded only the heart is experienced, just as when the heart is exposed there are no obstacles to the mind. The heart and mind only seem separate to the mind. To the heart all things are one.”

p.79
“In sending love to ourselves we send love to all. In sending healing we are healed. In letting go of that which blocks the heart, the confusions and old encrustations of the mind, we open into the heart of the world. As the sensations and thoughts and feelings that often surround illness become more audible, something within begins to melt in mercy for the pain we cause ourselves and the ways in which we have held so assiduously to our suffering. As the armoring mels, we experience our vastness, and the heart expands to fill the whole body with a sense of balance and wellness.”

p.109
“By making room in our heart for the lesser holdings, we cultivate the strength and presence for the greater.”

p.113
“When the mind sinks into the heart, we no longer feel so separate but recognize how connected we have always been and always will be.”

p.205
Taos Pueblo Shamans concept of “All Same” is when heart and mind our seen as one